Quantum computers are fragile and susceptible to rapid decoherence [1]}, and the use of topological protection has been proposed as a potential remedy. Typically, there are two propositions to make quantum computation practical for deep circuits: (i) fault-tolerant quantum computers, which use logical qubits and error correcting codes (like the surface code) to correct all errors that appear during computation [2]}, [3]}, [4]}, [5]}, [6]}, [7]}, [8]}, [9]}, [10]}, [11]} and (ii) topological quantum computers, which use topological qubits, naturally protected from the environment, to perform intrinsically error-free computations [12]}, [13]}, [14]}. Here, we propose a third avenue: when the model under study has non-trivial topological
invariants, the model's topological properties (rather than the hardware's) can be leveraged to identify its sharp phase transitions as the parameters are tuned.
